PhotoShop CS4 Getting GPU & Physics Acceleration

While Photoshop users probably vary more in their abilities than with any other product on the market (crop, resize, merge and blur will do me just fine) there is one thing in which they can all unite: it's a beast of a programme which could do with running a good deal faster. Here comes the solution...

Photoshop CS4, also dubbed 'CS Next'. Yup, an upgrade isn't traditionally the place to look for a performance boost on your old rig but when Adobe showcased their future plans at nVidia's Santa Clara HQ last week TGDaily nabbed some exciting info. According to the tech site, Adobe will look to incorporate GPU and physics acceleration into its operation - at a stroke freeing much of the CPU and speeding things up with these dedicated chips.
TGDaily said it watched "the presenter playing with a 2GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core Skulltrail system. Changes made through image zoom and through a new rotate canvas tool were applied almost instantly."

It notes that 3D model rendering is also stunningly quick and Adobe was keen to stress the time savings this could mean not just for hardcore graphics designers but everyday aspiring photographers and frustrated News Editors who regularly get sent ridiculous 15MB tiff images of printers and software boxes.

Interestingly TGDaily claims these game-changing improvements will be boxed into CS Next in time for a 1 October release - which seems mighty sharp to us and a date I'd suggest taking it with a pinch of salt. Still, October or not, this is just the enhancement Photoshop has been crying out for and even if we have to wait a while it looks like this will be the most valuable upgrade to the series in quite some time.